Random musings on life, society, and politics

Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt this week is less of a word than an action. She wrote, “Your prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is ‘point.’ Open a book on your lap, close your eyes, and put your finger on the page. Whatever you land on, whether it be a word, a phrase, or a sentence, write about it.”

This challenge proved, um, challenging for me because I no longer have any physical books. Every book I currently own is an ebook that is in my Kindle app on my iPhone. So I couldn’t exactly open a book on my lap, close my eyes, and put a finger on the page, could I?

Instead, I opened up the Kindle app, handed my iPhone to my wife, and asked her to randomly pick a book, open it up, pick a page in that book, and then pick a word, phrase, or sentence on that page, highlight it, and copy it. She did, and I pasted it below:

“One day he rose from his arm-chair, and went to his library in search of a book.”

This sentence came from the Victor Hugo classic, Les Misérables. It can be found in “loc 442 of 27004.” That means it’s fairly early in the book. In the first one percent, actually. I can’t tell you what the page number equivalent would be in the print edition because I don’t have a print edition of the book.

I asked my wife why she chose that particular sentence to copy. She told me that she thought it was apropos for the prompt that asked us to select a book and to choose a line from it. And she also thought that it held some irony in that I don’t have a physical library with actual books, but instead have a virtual library with electric books. Very clever, my wife is.

As to the context of the specific sentence she selected from the book, I have no idea. It’s been quite a few years since I read Les Misérables, and I’m pretty sure I’d have to go back and read at least a chapter or two before that sentence to figure out who “he” is and why he went in search of a book.

But I don’t want to do that. So instead, I am writing about the process of finding a random sentence in a random book so that I can respond Linda’s rather random prompt in a randomly stream of consciousness way.

You can get a pretty good estimate of the actual physical page you’re on by finding out how many physical pages there are (it’s on the information page for the book) and multiplying by the percent completed. I’m 21% of the way through a book that has 275 pages, so I’m roughly on page 58. Amazon says “Les Miserables” is 366 pages long, so the sentence is roughly on page 6.

But that’s beside the point…

I’ve gotten away from physical books as well. My right hand is crippled thanks to the stroke, and it’s hard to handle the pages with one hand. And, like you, I prefer the Kindle app on my phone to the Kindle Fire. The Fire has gotten real slow with Amazon’s insistence on loading Alexa to it and running it in the background, whether or not you want it…

Rather clever indeed…I’m fascinated by someone who literally has zero physical books. I just can’t seem to do it, even knowing that it’s ridiculously inconvenient to lug around physical copies of some of these books.
Great post today!

Thanks. We moved from the east coast to San Francisco about eight years ago. We had hundreds of books in our library, but I’d gotten into the habit of downloading ebooks onto either Kindle or my iPhone. I was working at the time and traveled a lot for my job and it was more convenient to have ebooks than carry around 2-3 physical books on these business trips. So when we moved, we donated all of our physical books to the local library and to Goodwill, so now it’s all virtual.